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D.L. Cox, a Leader of Radicals During 1960s, Dies at 74

Donald L. Cox, who was at the center of black radical politics as a member of the Black Panther Party high command and who earned a moment of celebrity in 1970 when he spoke at the Leonard Bernstein fund-raising party in Manhattan made notorious by the writer Tom Wolfe, died on Feb. 19 at his home in Camps-sur-l’Agly, France. He was 74.

His wife, Barbara Cox Easley, did not specify a cause. He had been living abroad since the early 1970s, when he fled the country after being implicated in a Baltimore murder.

Known as D. C., Mr. Cox held the title of field marshal with the Panthers, the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966. Mr. Cox was living in San Francisco at the time and became part of a group known as the central committee, which included Mr. Newton, Mr. Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and a handful of others.

Mr. Cox’s job was to travel the country to establish and supervise branch offices. But he was also the Panthers’ arms expert — writing about the proper use of guns in The Black Panther, the party newspaper, teaching party members to shoot and even procuring guns. The Panthers embraced the use of guns in defense of what they saw as black liberation from a white racist establishment; Mr. Cox liked to say he was in charge of the Panther military.

He also served the Panthers as a spokesman, and in January 1970 he appeared with a handful of Panthers and some 80 other guests at the Bernstein apartment on Park Avenue. The occasion was a fund-raiser for the legal defense of the New York Panther 21 — 19 men and 2 women who had been indicted on charges of plotting to kill police officers and blow up several sites, including Midtown stores, police precinct houses and the New York Botanical Garden.

“Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it useful to create that impression in order to support the power structure,” Mr. Cox told Mr. Bernstein’s guests. “They like for the Black Panther Party to be made to look like a racist organization, because that camouflages the true class nature of the struggle.”

The fund-raiser was notable for its clash of cultures. As Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times reported, “There they were, the Black Panthers from the ghetto and the black and white liberals from the middle, upper-middle and upper classes studying one another cautiously over the expensive furnishings, the elaborate flower arrangements, the cocktails and the silver trays of canapés.”

Among the conversations Ms. Curtis noted was an exchange between Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Cox.

Mr. Bernstein: “Now about your goals. I’m not sure I understand how you’re going to achieve them. I mean, what are your tactics?”

Mr. Cox: “If business won’t give us full employment, then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.”

The event raised nearly $10,000, Ms. Curtis reported. In May 1971 all 21 of the accused Panthers were acquitted. In June 1970 Mr. Wolfe’s article, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” was published in New York magazine. A skewering of Mr. Bernstein and his guests, it advanced Mr. Wolfe’s career as a leading proponent of the so-called new journalism. But it was reviled by Mr. Cox. The guests that night, he told Roz Payne, who documented the history of the Panthers in a series of films, “were really a concerned bunch of people.”

He added that “it was those media freaks and that bloodsucking Tom Wolfe” who exploited the cause of black liberation to make money from it and “to be part of the machinery that tried to ridiculize it.”

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Donald Lee Cox was born on April 16, 1936, in Appleton, in west central Missouri, where he grew up hunting small game and reading everything he could find about nature and the outdoors.

“I read all the books in the library about snakes,” he told Ms. Payne for her film series. (That series has been released on DVD under the title taken from the Panther party platform: “What We Want, What We Believe.”)

He moved to San Francisco at 17, by his own account an ignorant country boy who was politically naïve until he joined the Panthers.

But as he explained in interviews, anger had been building up in him over attacks on black people, like the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, which killed four black girls, and, closer to home, the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by policemen that set off a riot in the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco in 1966.

“It was a steady accumulation of pressure, like a volcano,” he said.

Shortly after the Bernstein dinner, Mr. Cox was charged as a conspirator in the July 1969 murder of Eugene Anderson, a Panther who had been a police informer in Baltimore. Mr. Cox said he had had nothing to do with the killing. One of several co-defendants was convicted of the crime.

After a warrant was issued for his arrest, Mr. Cox left the country, first living in Algeria and then in France. His first marriage, in San Francisco, ended in divorce. He met Ms. Easley, who lives in Philadelphia, in the 1960s, and though they had not lived together since he left the country, she said, they married in 2006 so that she would have legal standing in his affairs.

In addition to Ms. Easley, he is survived by a daughter, Kimberly Cox Marshall of Vallejo, Calif.; two sons, Donald, of Dallas, and Jonathan, of Philadelphia; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

“He created a very comfortable life here,” his wife said in a phone interview from Camps-sur-l’Agly, where she was tending to her husband’s matters, though she added that the isolation had begun to wear on him.

“Exile will do that to you,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2011, on Page D11 of the New York edition with the headline: D.L. Cox, 74,
A Leader
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